"Why Can't I Be Different and Original . . . Like Everybody Else?" - Viv Stanshall

Thursday, April 02, 2015

Zazen Is Good For Nothing - Kodo Sawaki Roshi

There are some people that we meet in the world who are charismatic and attractively calm, centered, and self-assured. These people make good spiritual teachers, but they did not become charismatic and attractively calm, centered, and self-assured due to their spiritual practice - they were like that before practice and even without their practice they would still have been charismatic and attractively calm, centered, and self-assured.

Genuine spiritual practice in general and zazen in particular does not make you something that you weren't before - it strips away the layers of what you're not and leaves you naked as you really are, and if you're charismatic and attractively calm, centered, and self-assured, you're in luck because you'll still be that way.

It's a mistake to enter into a spiritual practice with the intention of becoming like that charismatic and attractively calm, centered, and self-assured spiritual teacher, because you're you or at least some sort of manifestation of you. And if your charismatic and attractively calm, centered, and self-assured spiritual teacher holds out the promise that you'd be like him or her someday then run - they're not offering a genuine spiritual practice and at the end of the day they'll have your money and be wealthier, charismatic and attractively calm, centered, and self-assured spiritual teachers.

1 comment:

This is an excellent point, one that's been made thousands of times and forgotten just as often. Zazen is zazen. It _does_ have a positive effect, generally, on one's life, but that's neither reliable (it may or may not work in any given moment or situation) nor the point. I find it's kind of an aggregate thing - benefits pile up over time. And also that expectations of that are deadly.

We sit to sit. We don't have to ask permission to sit, take anyone's direction of our sitting, or accept anyone's dismissal of our sitting.